The path to working as a chief executive officer in the pharmaceutical industry started for Matt Stroschein when he was a 13-year-old custodian in a bagel shop. Every evening, he would clean the shop and prepare it for the bakers the next day. The shop owners saw his eagerness to learn and taught him about the business.
This first job left an impression and taught him how to manage his time and see the bigger picture. Moving from custodian to baker taught Stroschein how to juggle academic and athletic commitments with work obligations. During high school, he learned about inventory, planning and equipment. “When I started making bagels, my schedule changed drastically,” he said. “I had to wake up at 3 a.m. every day. But for the high school kid in me, that was better than spending my Friday nights cleaning the shop! It was all a great lesson in discipline and time management.”
As an adult, Stroschein put those early lessons in discipline and time management to use, leading operations for small, fast-growing startups. Eventually, he formulated the idea and started to build WAYS Pharmaceutical Services, where he serves as CEO today.
WAYS provides regulatory operations services to the life sciences industry. “The WAYS team employs innovative operations on behalf of our client partners to bring new therapies to market more quickly,” the company said. “Our mission is to operationalize our combined knowledge and practical experience to efficiently deliver quality, compliant regulatory submissions to health authorities around the world. We strive to continuously devote the same level of care and attention to organizing and compiling our clients’ R&D information that their teams used in producing it.”
Stroschein’s vision for the organization in the next five years is to maintain its role in the life sciences industry while educating customers on changing requirements. This collaborative approach will ensure that WAYS customers continue to reap the benefits of efficient, reliable and compliant regulatory submission processes while also positioning them for success in the future, the company said.
Stroschein said starting WAYS was his biggest professional risk, but the results have been worth it.
“Starting WAYS Pharmaceutical Services was a big risk. However, we saw a strong need for regulatory operations expertise that we knew we could address,” he said “The gap in the market was growing, and we really believed we could offer far greater value than the options that were available at that time. We decided to go for it and walked the fine line of minimizing risk while building our capabilities. Knowing that we could actually make a difference for many of our industry colleagues was a motivating factor, and it helped us keep the risk in perspective.”
